


The Art of Reading

by Jo Robbins (plenilune)



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Hotel Rooms, Hurt/Comfort, bizarre almost domesticity, not quite romance, really personal obsessions with boston's north shore and johann weyer, season three or four or five somewhere, these nerds are so in love and have no idea come on kids
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-07
Updated: 2013-03-07
Packaged: 2017-12-04 13:10:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/711112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plenilune/pseuds/Jo%20Robbins
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was September, and it was wet, and it was one o’clock in the morning, and Dana Scully, who had just lost a very nice glove in an open grave, was currently engaged in half-carrying her significantly taller partner down a hill.  A misadventure, in which features inadvisable grave-digging, injury, insult, and bedtime reading of a dubious nature.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Art of Reading

    It was September, and it was wet, and it was one o’clock in the morning, and Dana Scully, who had just lost a very nice glove in an open grave, was currently engaged in half-carrying her significantly taller partner down a hill.

   She had, objectively, experienced better nights.

   At least Mulder had stopped _talking_ – and that thought cut off as soon as she realised that was precisely what was worrying her, that over the course of the last eight minutes he had uttered absolutely no sound other than the occasional “ow” or muffled swearing — and he wasn’t, in fact, unconscious, or likely to become so simply by virtue of a sprain, even a bad sprain somewhat melodramatically acquired.

   He hadn’t even taken advantage of the wealth of opportunities for _grave emergency_ wordplay, she reflected desperately. Which she was forced to conclude meant – as she  narrowly avoided a jutting rock – that he was in rather more pain than he was letting on.

   “Ow,” he said, exactly on schedule, somewhat muffled as his nose brushed, not gently, against her ear.

   “Put your weight on _me_ , not on your ankle, for God’s sake,” she said; it came out sharp with exhaustion and frustration, much sharper than she’d meant.

   “And then you snap in half and we fall the rest of the way down the damn hill?” he offered. His voice was strained, but at least he was making unforgiveable jokes again.

   “Maybe I’ll push you first,” she said, and was rewarded with a huff of laughter in her hair.

   The car was parked where they’d left it, by the cemetery’s large and somewhat self-important front gate – Scully blessed Mulder’s casual disregard for parking lots – and from there it was simply a matter of navigating Mulder into the car without jarring his ankle too badly. “You have the keys,” she remembered aloud, as he leaned against the side of the car on one foot, grimacing. “If you’ve lost them—”

   “I’d break my other ankle _myself_ ,” he said, and fished them from the pocket of his coat.

   “Your ankle’s not broken,” she told him automatically.

   He pulled a face and shrugged, as if to say, _details_ , and handed her the keys. His hand was rain-wet and cold against her fingers. Dry clothes _immediately_ , she determined, noting the way his jaw clamped shut over any threat of a tremble, probably in a vain attempt to keep her from frowning at him and saying _hypothermia_ , which she’d already resolved to bring up as soon as they got in the car.

   After all, there’d been nothing in that goddamn grave.

   The case had been so _straightforward_ at first, she thought morosely, turning the car out of the tangle of half-cut grass in which it had been parked. Standard issue demonic possession setup they’d both been able to debunk as such within their first few hours in Massachusetts, until Mulder had started fussing at the fact that the case was too _neat_ , and also the suspect who’d been found on the scene covered in the first victim’s blood was definitely innocent, and by the time he’d arrived at the conclusion that the suspect was being controlled by someone else _using_ the suspect’s documented preoccupation with the occult as a cover, she was ready to do just about anything just to get him to concede, up to and including driving to a graveyard after midnight in the rain and letting him leap into open graves waiting for tomorrow’s funeral, and sprain his ankle.

    (Well, injury had not been part of the plan. Neither had the rain, and she briefly thought perhaps she would have told him to leave her at the hotel and continue chasing strange leads on his own, except that of course she knew Fox Mulder well enough to know better than to let him wander around graveyards at night _by himself_. Also, she was curious despite herself, as usual; _damn_ her curiosity. Her mother had given her those gloves for Christmas.) She stole a sideways glance at Mulder, who had leaned back against the seat, injured foot on the dashboard, and shut his eyes, mouth a little too narrow. His hair, damp from rain and grave-digging, had spilled over his forehead, into his eyes, and she was possessed by a sudden, inexplicable surge of irritation.

   Well, she was wet and she’d been pulling people out of graves; irritation was not entirely unwarranted.

   “There’s a hospital about ten minutes’ drive from here, I think,” she said, instead of reaching over to push wet hair out of his face, which was proving an improbably difficult impulse to curb. “We can—”

   Mulder’s eyes flew open and he shot her a look of horror. “I don’t need to go to a _hospital_ ,” he said, as though she’d just suggested he remedy his ankle by plunging headfirst into the ocean. “They’ll make me lie in a bed for days in a giant handkerchief and eat horrible jell-o.”

   “You’ve just _sprained your ankle_ —”

   “—and all they can possibly do for it is elevation and reducing the swelling; I know the drill, Scully—”

    “Also, you have all the symptoms of mild hypothermia—”

    “—the hotel is closer than the hospital, so if you’re really enthused about preventing me from going into shock—”

   “ _Mulder_ —”

   “—it’ll throw us hours off course, and by then Gideon Wrede will have caught wind of something and probably skipped town—”

   “We have not credibly established Gideon Wrede as a suspect, Mulder—”

   “Really, because I could have sworn that was what we just did.”

   “There was nothing in that grave! Except, actually, my glove—”

   “And—” He rattled his coat pocket and, ridiculously, for a man covered in rain and mud with a sprained ankle propped up in a moving car, _grinned_.

   “ _Nails_ , Mulder, and not even new ones; that is hardly admissible evidence for so much as a _search warrant_.”

   “A _lot_ of nails, significantly more than would accidentally turn up underground, not to mention several hinges, an old padlock, a couple of skeleton keys, and what looks like small car parts, which is, even you have to admit, not going to be all underground in a grave at the same time _unless it’s on purpose_ , and thus only serves to solidify my theory that—” The car went over a bump, and he swore through his teeth, hunching his shoulders.

   “Sorry,” she said. “The roads out here are horrible.”

    He laughed, pressing his forehead against the window for a moment. “Lynn, Lynn, city of sin, you never go out the way you come in. Especially on a rainy night.”

   “—What?”

   “Old local rhyme. Not the shiniest reputation, this town; even Marshmallow Fluff coming from here can’t save ‘em. Used to drive through it as a kid sometimes, on the way to Salem.”

   “Why am I profoundly unsurprised by this information?” She could feel her eyebrow rising – and her mouth turning up. Dammit again.

   “They have a _pirate museum_ in Salem, Scully.” He shifted around in his seat to flash her that delighted, earnest look of his that, at the moment, for no particular reason, made her want to push him out of the car. Something about the logic-defying series of valleys into which his forehead crumpled made her feel more frustrated than ever, remembering that her hair was wet and her feet were wet and the only reason _she’d_ avoided verge-of-hypothermia symptoms was because she had not removed her coat and blazer and leapt headlong to dig deeper into an open grave and dear God how badly she wanted to take a hot shower and put on dry clothes and go the hell to _bed_ , but here was her ridiculous injured partner grinning as if by doing so he could transform the entire tangle into a grand adventure.

   “You know, if we solve this quick enough, we could take a gamble at it.”

   She meant to scowl at him, but it turned out she was smiling indulgently instead. Damn _everything_. “I’m not letting you loose in Salem. God knows when I’d ever get you out.”

   “You wound me,” he said. There was a tiny hitch in his voice where he hadn’t managed to conceal a tremble. Definitely hypothermia symptoms, and from the way his jaw momentarily tensed she could tell he’d noticed she’d caught it. She quickly ran through the options for hot drinks available in most hotel lobbies that contained neither alcohol nor caffeine. It would probably have to be cocoa.

   “Yeah, I know. We’re two minutes from the hotel. We’re going to take hot showers and you’re going to put on dry clothes and then I’m going to be in to see to your ankle and then you are not going to move for the rest of the night, no matter what enlightenment might suddenly descend upon you at four am. Are we quite clear?”

   He had to have noted by now that she’d gone in entirely the wrong direction for the hospital. He grinned again, though his mouth looked strained. “ _Okay_ , Dr Scully,” he said, mock exasperated, and leaned back again, and closed his eyes.

 

   Why they had, by the luck of the draw, ended up with hotel rooms on the fifth floor was just adding insult to injury, Scully thought, though at least there was an elevator, and her pockets were full of Swiss Miss packets she’d snatched from the lobby. Mulder had stopped talking again, and spent most of the elevator ride leaning heavily on her shoulder, his face, after a moment, falling against her hair, as though he were too tired to keep his head upright This only served to make her more aware of the irregularities in his breathing patterns and the occasional involuntary tremble – and if he was tired enough to lean, breathing warm into her hair, shifting the movement of it against her jaw—

   She helped him off with his trench coat, feeling the rattle of the collection of iron detritus in the right-hand pocket as she tossed it over a chair to dry, and she kept hearing the echo of that rattle in her head as she slipped down the hall to her own room and peeled off her own wet clothes and turned on the hotel shower as hot as it would go.

   When she rapped on the door fifteen minutes later (difficult through an armful of pillows and medkit and a tub of ice from the ill-tempered ice machine at the end of the hall), the only answer was a muffled “it’s open”, and she elbowed through the door to find Mulder sitting on the edge of the bed in a dark t-shirt and drawstring trousers, towel-drying his hair; he looked up at her from beneath the tangle of it, deliberately, comically morose.

   “I told you to _elevate_ your foot, not ‘gingerly keep it an inch off the floor’,” she said, not, she hoped, unkindly, and shut the door with her heel. She set the pillows and her medkit on the room’s cheap wooden table, which was fortunately accompanied by an equally cheap wooden chair – useless for sitting comfortably, but adequate for propping up sprained limbs. “Rest your foot on that,” she said, pushing it towards the bed, and went to fetch a towel from the bathroom to wrap the ice in. She glanced at the corner as she came out: something encased in faux brocade bristled in a hostile fashion in front of the radiator. “How come you’ve got an _armchair_? I did not get an armchair. I don’t think that’s fair.”

   “I don’t know if that’s an armchair so much as a kitchen chair someone glued an old bedspread to,” Mulder said, tossing his towel at it, and missing. “ _Ow_. Don’t be jealous, it’s probably going to eat me in my sleep. I mean, look at it.”

   Scully thought it wise to leave the sinister machinations of armchairs well enough alone. “Put your _foot_ up. We need to reduce the swelling before I can bandage it, and I’m going to make you some cocoa—”

    Mulder looked up, mouth quirked in amusement. “You’re making me _cocoa_? God, Scully, are you trying to tell me I’m _dying_?”

    “If anyone would be melodramatic enough to die of a minor injury, I’m sure you’d find a way,” she said evenly, coming to fold herself onto the floor with her bundle of ice. “They didn’t have any decaffeinated tea in the lobby. A hot drink is a standard treatment for hypothermia symptoms, and since anything containing caffeine or alcohol is out, there isn’t much readily available aside from cocoa. Stop moving and let me see your ankle.”

   “Do you know how hard it is to _not move_?”

   “You could start by shutting your mouth.”

    Mulder said, “Argh,” with great feeling, and shut his eyes, but he did stop twitching. She rolled up his trouser leg and gently probed his ankle – his skin was still cold to the touch, and he flinched, but the swelling and bruising was less bad than she’d feared.

   “It’s less bad than it looked in the dark,” she said. “Get the swelling down, bandage it, you stay off it for a few days, and you should be fine.” She wrapped the makeshift icepack deftly and stood up, going for the counter. “However if you don’t get warmer I’m going to have to make you wear a blanket. And possibly lecture you about not going to a real hospital.”

    “We were both out there in the same rain. How come I’m the lucky bastard who gets bonus hypothermia?”

   “I didn’t take off my coat and jacket and leap into an open grave with my sleeves rolled up, Mulder. Aha.” She’d found the hotel logo-stamped paper cups, nested together beside the microwave. “This is, by the way, a terrible microwave.”

    “Microwaving cocoa, you heathen,” he said, and somehow contrived to flop back onto the mattress without disturbing the weird angle at which his leg was propped on the chair beside the bed. “Don’t think I won’t put this in my field report.”

   “How would you suggest I make cocoa?”

   “In a _saucepan_ ,” Mulder retorted, indignant, “with _milk_.”

    She put two paper cups into the microwave and leaned against the counter. “When was the last time you made cocoa in a saucepan, Mulder? I’m very curious.”

   “About six years ago, but that is beside the point. Ow. Please tell me you’re spiking that with morphine.”

   “I’m spiking this with morphine,” she intoned, nodding at the microwave, which was trembling as though not quite sure it was up for the challenge of heating water for two entire minutes. “I do have painkillers, though. _Non-opiate_ painkillers,” she added as Mulder pushed up on an elbow to flash her an interested grin. “You’re moving far too much.”

   The microwave beeped, and she busied herself mixing the cocoa powder into the water, neat and careful, because something in the back of her mind was ticking and she didn’t like it. “Drink up,” she said at last, coming over to perch on the end of the bed. She handed him one of the cups and a couple of painkillers, noting, as he sat up again and his fingers grazed hers, that his hand was still cold, despite the shower and dry clothes. “As soon as we’ve got the swelling down I’ll brace it, and then… sleep.” Convulsively she rubbed her eyes and sipped at her cocoa. It was too-sweet and chalky, and nostalgically comforting.

   “Well, don’t let me stop you.” He tilted his head back for the pills and and took a shot of cocoa as though it were something stronger, then immediately sputtered. “ _Ow_.”

   “Sip it, it’s hot,” she said; she could feel her mouth turning up at the corners again.

   “Thanks for the warning.” He coughed, pressing the back of his hand against his mouth.

   “I thought you were at least cognizant enough to test it first. Do you drink your coffee like that?”

    “You say that like I don’t forget it till it’s gone cold. As I recall I came in a couple of weeks ago to find about six mugs and a paper cup lined up on my desk like they were about to face a firing squad for being half-full of ancient coffee. Since you obviously have no memory of insulting my coffee-drinking abilities, may I assume that I’ve attracted a really passive-aggressive poltergeist?”

   “Sounds more like a brownie,” she said over the rim of her cup, playing along. “Have you been leaving milk out again?”

   “What crime could a brownie possibly commit that’d merit sending it to clean _that_?”

   She laughed, and curled her hands around the cup, noting that her brush with hypothermia, at least, had been avoided; her hands were completely steady.

   “Sorry about your glove,” Mulder said abruptly. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and his eyes were too bright, and she realised that what he was saying was, _sorry about this whole damn mess._

   “It was a very nice glove,” she said, with exaggerated petulance. “It had buttons.”

   “I’ll get you a new one,” he said, and then checked himself, almost smiling. “Two, even. A whole new pair.”

   “You better.” She swallowed the last of her cocoa, chalky sweetness clinging at the back of her throat. “At least it died in the field.”

   Mulder saluted her with his cup. “To Scully’s glove,” he said solemnly. “It died bravely in pursuit of the truth.”

   “Speaking of which, we still have an investigation in the morning.” She set her empty cup on the floor and pushed forward to check on his ankle. “I’m going to get an Ace bandage and tie this up, and then we both need to sleep.” She was annoyed at how slurred her voice came out; apparently she was more tired than she’d realised.

   “ _You_ have an investigation in the morning,” he said pointedly, with a huff of breath at the end that had probably been meant to be a laugh. “Accidental self-saboteurs need not apply.”

   “Well, I’m not about to allow you to hobble all over Lynn on crutches; you shouldn’t be walking for a couple of days yet – but I’m still going to need you. Keep your phone charged.”

   “Don’t let them convict that kid, Scully,” he said, suddenly earnest.

   “Mulder, it’s not looking very good for him; he was found covered in blood and holding the murder weapon.”

   “You were right there in that interrogation room with me, Scully; he was terrified. Not of us. Just… scared. Even if he was the instrument that – look, I know you don’t think much of my theory about Wrede, but you have to at least…”

   “Yeah,” she said, “okay. I know. Drink your cocoa, Mulder.”

   In a few moments she’d got the bandage and secured it round his ankle without him making more than an obligatory fuss – which was still worrying her more than the threat of going into shock had done, that and the rigid brace of his shoulders, the too-brightness in his eyes and smile. “That’s done,” she said, and stifled a yawn as discreetly as she could manage. She pushed up off the floor where she’d been kneeling, switched on a lamp, switched off the light. “Now lie down and get under the covers and if you can manage it, get some goddamn sleep.”

   “Tuck me in, Scully?” he said with deliberate plaintiveness, easing his foot off the wooden chair and onto the mattress.

   “I think you can manage.” She thought for half a moment of slipping out and falling into her own bed, possibly face-first. “You do realise it’s past two in the morning?”  
   Mulder had wrestled himself under the hotel comforter by this point, throwing an arm over his face, and responded eloquently, “Mrgh.”

   She _could_ leave; she would have to shoulder the brunt of the investigation in the morning. Instead, she dragged the disreputable armchair out of its corner and sat down in it, kicking off her shoes and curling her feet up under her. “I’m going to bed in a minute.”

   “Ha ha ha,” Mulder said, muffled, because his arm was still over his face. “Well, don’t let me stop you.”

   She really shouldn’t have sat down. “Stop talking and go to sleep.”

   “You’re very bossy when you’re falling asleep.”

   “I’m not falling asleep,” she said, and tried to remember exactly when she’d closed her eyes. “You should have gone to a hospital. _You_ should be falling asleep.”

    “Can’t,” he said. “But you go on and sleep the peaceful sleep of someone who hasn’t screwed up the entire investigation.”

    Without opening her eyes she could see the exact shape of his face, the sharp, bitter twist of eyebrows and mouth, drawing the strokes of expression too bold and deliberate to be taken seriously, so that no one, in the end, would. That flash of deep, gut-keen irritation caught at her again, humming in her belly and her throat. She pushed up on her elbow, forcing her eyes open. “Shut up,” she said distinctly. “Go to sleep. I might make you get up for breakfast in the morning and explain exactly what you want me to do with the metal debris you found.”

   “Specifically iron,” he said, still muffled.

   “Go to sleep, Mulder.”

   “Read me a story?” he half drawled, throwing his arm far enough behind his head that he could peer up and out at her, childish and self-mocking and still startlingly earnest for all that. She was going to laugh at him, diffuse it, but the set of his mouth was still all wrong, and she remembered, in a fleeting, sudden, celluloid flicker, once early in their partnership driving through the night to Delaware, when she’d had a lingering headache and he would not stop _talking_ – she specifically remembered him outlining the plot to some film he’d seen as a child, though she couldn’t remember if there’d been context – and she’d snapped at him, rubbing between her eyebrows, if he _ever_ wished for a moment of absolute silence.

   He’d laughed. “Not really. It’s usually louder in here.” He’d tapped his head and grinned a facsimile of his joke-making grin, but the swift look away betrayed him.

   Too loud to sleep sometimes.

   “Sure, why not,” she said, matching his mocking tone. “What do you want to hear, a nice cosy case report? What the hell do we even have in here?”

   She thought she saw him smile, small and startled, but it was too dim to tell. She fumbled out of the disreputable armchair (it creaked menacingly and she wondered if she ought to worry about it falling to pieces underneath her) and found, in the dim, a pile of binders and papers. There were some case reports, and some ongoing files and paperwork, but her hands found what felt like books. One of them turned out to be a local phone book, but the other, a sallow, battered hardcover with fading stickers declaring it the property of the Lynn Public Library, seemed vaguely promising, at least more promising than a case report—

   It was a translation of a sixteenth-century Latin text, composed by one Johann Weyer, on ‘the False Hierarchy of Demons’. She actually laughed. “Mulder, did you steal this?” she asked, her disapproval ruined by the laugh still in her voice. “More important question: how sleepy do lists of demons of antiquity make you?”

   “I didn’t take it from the library, I took it from McGrath’s bedroom. I was going to check if the murder victims matched up to anything detailed in there. There were some other things, but I think they’re in the car.”

   “Mulder…”

   “ _Evidence_ ,” he insisted. “I was being thorough. I haven’t read most of them yet, though. Just enough to confirm that—”

    “That Elias McGrath couldn’t have possibly committed murders that fit the ritual profile _that closely_ , I know. We’re not talking about the case anymore, Mulder, because you’re going to sleep.”

   “Get my phone; put it under my pillow.”

    She laughed, and felt like there was something bright and sharp caught in her throat, heavy like sadness and cutting like delight, and here she was in a hotel room with faded curtains in a declining Massachusetts town holding someone else’s occult library book, being disapproved of by an armchair, her mouth sticky with cocoa and grave dirt still under her fingernails, eyesight blurring and flickering with exhaustion, and she’d never felt a sense of belonging more quiet and content than now.

    She folded the thought to examine later, and said, “I wouldn’t go that far. But as a medical doctor it would be criminally lax of me to injure your ankle further by ringing you in four or five hours and leading you to go leaping after your phone forgetting you’ve sprained your ankle. No, you _would_ ,” she said sternly, and went and found Mulder’s phone, lying on the hotel table with wallet and cast-off tie and scattered pocket debris, and set it on the bedside table, under the lamp. “Go to _sleep_ ,” she said, thinking suddenly and unexpectedly of old folktales in which one had to command a thing three times before it was done. She passed a hand over his forehead, brushing still-damp hair from his eyes, and felt him breathe hot and startled against her skin, and the sudden, fleeting pressure of his nose against the inside of her wrist. Her thumb traced the line of his eyebrow and she stepped away, curled into the armchair and hoped it wouldn’t break.

   (Such a lot of things were easily breakable.)

   “‘ _An inventory of the names, shapes, powers, government, and effects of devils and spirits_ ,” she read, squinting at the smudged, crowded print, “ _of their several seniorities and degrees: a strange discourse worth the reading._ ’ They don’t print copy the way they used to.”

   “Maybe the sixteenth century’ll make a comeback,” Mulder said blurrily. “Probably about time.”

   “And then the author goes on for a bit about who he does and does not wish to accuse… or thank… I can’t quite tell, so you’ll forgive me if I skip it. God, you think a highschool kid would really go through this?”

   “Well he’s definitely gonna get rid of all his Led Zeppelin records _now_.”

   “That’s not demons, that’s—”

   “Nah, Jimmy Page had a big crush on Aleister Crowley. You know, Crowley faked his own death once, just for the hell of it? And then wandered back into town a week later, all hey, miss me? How bored you think you gotta get?”

   His voice still had that too-sharp edge to it, but the ends of words were slurring towards sleep. She propped the book on her knee. “Now I guess we get lists of demons. Good choice, this does sound like nice sleep-inducing material. _Bael_ – _when he is conjured up, appears with three heads, the first like a toad, the second like a man, the third like a cat._ That sounds uncomfortable. _He speaks in a hoarse voice and makes a man invisible? He has under his obedience and rules six legions of devils._ ” She squinted down the page. “ _Marbas, or Barbas, is a great president—_ ”

   “Wouldn’t vote for him,” Mulder mumbled.

   “— _but at the commandment of a conjurer comes up in the likeness of a man, and answers fully as touching anything which is hidden or secret_. So far, so good – _he brings diseases, and cures them._ These demons sound oddly placid. He promotes wisdom, and… knowledge of handicrafts? That can’t be right.” She scanned down the muddled page again. “Buer… teaches philosophy?”

   “Explains a lot about philosophers if they’ve been summoning demons to learn the trade all this time.”

   “—and also logic, and the virtues of herbs? Maybe this _is_ evidence, Mulder;  according to these descriptions the best McGrath could do in his occult-emulating attempts was plant herbs and find things.”

   Mulder said, “Hmmm,” half amused, half asleep, and she thought tiredly, _I should probably go now_ , but instead she kept reading, forgetting the words as they went past her and only wrapping her mouth around the shape of them, slowly drawn to underwater darkness by the sound of her own voice. At some point she put her head on her knees and let her eyes shut, but she thought that she could still hear herself reading, list by list, or perhaps it was the long hum of the car engine and the road – no, she wasn’t on the road; perhaps it was the sea, unrelenting and strange and gentle; or the wind catching at the trees through the rain; or the steadiness of breathing in the dark, matched to her own.

   Sleep came in, inevitable, like the tide; breathing and heartbeat and rain a single sound.

**Author's Note:**

> \- disclaimer: in no way was this fic even remotely inspired by (any of) the time(s) I was having an anxiety fit and calmed myself by imagining Gillian Anderson's voice reading my favourite grimoire. (psh, like I have a favourite grimoire.) what do you take me for, honestly.  
> \- thank you to Jessica, to whom I originally texted the germ of this as a bedtime story and who obligingly yelled at me to write it for weeks on end, and to R.J. Anderson, who made me stop hand-flapping about what a silly indulgent idea it was and how I'd forgotten how to fic, and just write it, and then very kindly beta'd it for me.  
> \- I "accidentally" sent Mulder and Scully to the town in which I partially grew up. all of the facts mentioned are true (I've driven past the Marshmallow Fluff factory). other fun facts: Lynn, Massachusetts was once the shoe-manufacturing capital of much of the world, and the town square is shaped like a shoe. there are rumours that Blackbeard buried treasure in the Lynn Woods. the stone fence that runs around Pine Grove Cemetery (yes, that's the one I dropped them in; it's the largest) is allegedly the second-longest continuous wall in the world, after the Great Wall of China. also, I've totally been to the pirate museum in Salem. it was awesome.


End file.
